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Understanding The Subtext Of The Therapeutic Relationship

When we talk about psychotherapy, one aspect of what we look at is the process of what occurs in the therapeutic relationship.  This is an important part of psychodynamic-based psychotherapy, meaning psychotherapy that is derived from the theories put forth by Freud.  Psychoanalysis (the purest form of psychodynamic psychotherapy) includes an emphasis on events that occurred during childhood, and a focus on understanding what goes on in the relationship between the therapist and the patient, including the transference and counter-transference.

In some of our posts, our friend Jesse has commented about how it’s important to understand what transpires in the mind of the patient when certain things are said and done.  Let me tell you that Jesse is a wonderful psychiatrist, he is warm and caring and attentive and gentle, and he’s had extensive training in the analytic method, he’s on my list of who I go to when I need help, so while I want to discuss this concept, I don’t want anyone, especially Jesse, to think I don’t respect him.  With that disclaimer…..

On my tongue-in-cheek post on What to Get Your Psychiatrist for the Holidays, Jesse wrote: Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Shrink Rap*

The Stigma Of Psychiatric Treatment And Its Inclusion In The EMR

For a while now we’ve been talking about issues related to psychiatry and electronic medical records.  Roy is very interested in the evolution of EHR’s.

I don’t like them.  I think they have too many problems still, both in terms of issues of efficiency and time, and how they divert the physician’s attention away from the patient, and they focus medical appointments on the collection of data– data that is used in a checkbox form: patient is not suicidal and I asked, whether it was clinically relevant or not– and will therefore serve as protection in a lawsuit, or demographic information used by insurers, the government, who knows.

From a privacy standpoint, I think they are appalling.   If you are a patient in the hospital where I work, you get Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Shrink Rap*

Therapy Is About Having An Honest Relationship, But Is Lying Ever OK?

We’ve been having a great discussion over on the post Tell Me…. An Ethical Dilemma.  The post talks about a young man who wants to know if he can check “no” to a question about whether he has a psychiatric disorder if his illness is not relevant to the situation.  The comments have been fascinating — do read them– and very thought-provoking.

One reader asked, ” If a patient asked if they were boring you, and they were, would you say yes?”

This is a great question, and of course the right thing to do is to explore with the patient what meaning the concern has to him.  But is that all?  I’m not very good at doing the old psychoanalyst thing of deflecting all questions, and mostly I do answer questions when they are asked of me.  This can present a really sticky situation because one can not think of any clinical scenario in which it would be therapeutic to have a therapist tell a patient, ‘Yes, you’re boring, OMG are you boring,’ or ‘No, in fact, I don’t like you.’  And not answering could be viewed as negative response by the patient –if you liked me, you’d tell me, so clearly you don’t like me.  So if the exploration of the question doesn’t take care of the issue, and the patient continues to ask, what’s a shrink to do? Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Shrink Rap*

Why Don’t Psychiatrists Like To Show Patients Their Notes?

Please see my post on Clinical Psychiatry News and yesterday’s post What’s in a Note? along with the reader comments.

One reader asked why it’s weird to want to see your shrink’s notes and why shrinks refuse to show them on the grounds that they may distress the patients.  Another reader asked why doctors write “patient denies” as though they don’t believe the patient.  These are both great questions worthy of their own post.

Why don’t psychiatrists like to show patients their notes?  Are they really going to “harm” the patient?  There are a few reasons why a psychiatrist may not want to show a patient her notes.  Here is my list of thoughts as bullet points. Please feel free to add to it. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Shrink Rap*

A Shrink Considers The Effectiveness Of Her Scheduling Method

I’ve been at it a long time, and one thing (of many things) that I still have not gotten down is scheduling.  I seem to have a method to my own madness, but somehow I imagine it’s not how other people do this.  I’ve heard other shrinks say, “I’m booked for the next 4 weeks” or say they aren’t taking any new patients.  Some people put a “no new patients” message on their answering machine.  Wait, so no appointments for 4 weeks?  What if a patient calls and needs to be seen very soon? Like this week?  If you can’t wait, go to the ER?  I thought the point of having a private doc was that you didn’t have to go to the ER unless something couldn’t be handled safely as an outpatient.  And if you tell the world that you don’t take new patients, then don’t people stop referring to you?  It seems to me that patients will come in and announce, “I’m doing better and want to come less often,”  “I’m moving,”  “I’m done,” or they will cancel an appointment, not call back, and not be heard from again for weeks or months.  Sometimes it all happens on very short notice and life can be very unpredictable.

In my pre-shrink days, I thought that psychiatry worked such that patients came every week (or twice a week, or whatever) and had their own slots.  Tuesday at 1, that’s me!  So a psychiatrist had every slot full with patients this way, and could be “full,” until a patient finished and stopped coming, and then another soul was let in to the Tuesday at 1 slot.  Gosh that would be nice, but it doesn’t seem to work that way. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Shrink Rap*

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